Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

... No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between 'doing' social (bolted on) and 'being' social (built in), and you know which one you're on the receiving end of in any given situation right? Read more

I'm not a WOMMA member but I am a special adviser to AMEC and The Conclave, and it was in this capacity that Brad Fay and I invested more than a few hours with WOMMA's Neil Beam to lend our insight and points of view and, we hope, help make this guidebook the complete rewrite it's turned out to be.

I've expressed Euler Partners' approach to influence in recent posts, notably "Influence - request for comments" (slidestack included below for your convenience), and we were delighted to have the opportunity to present these to the WOMMA team. In particular: Read more

That's how I opened a blog post back in November, The Influence View of Content, and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.

Names have been changed...

Incident 1

Anne: "So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time."

Me: "So if we're looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us... the owned stuff that has earned a share – a 'Like', a RT, a +1 for example." Read more

Précis

The Influence View of Content aims to establish something more useful. It’s a perspective that seeks to help influence professionals think about how influence goes around and comes around in line with the Influence Scorecard framework.

Definition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Definition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.

Paid Owned Earned

With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy: Read more

A year ago, to the week, I was writing Chapter 8 of The Business of Influence about the future trends each and every influence professional would have to grasp. In particular, I wrote:

I consider the data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.

Should I consider entering a contract with the purchase of a product or service that entails some variation to this default – perhaps simply because delivery of the product or service is meaningless without such variation – the nature of this variation must be made explicitly clear to me in plain language, and it is then my choice whether or not to agree to those terms, which may entail my negotiating different terms or choosing not to buy that specific product or service.

To me, a future where so much data is collected about me and owned by others is nothing short of dystopia. Of course, the situation I describe above is far from where we find ourselves today and I make the case that influence professionals should be helping to lead the charge toward empowering the customer – past, present and future. As such, the chapter continues to lay out a potential privacy framework, introducing Streams Banks:

It’s the moniker I’ve given the service with the primary purpose of collecting all your digital detritus, all your so-called life streams of data, in one place on your behalf and giving you the power to analyse and visualize it all.

A streams bank archives the minutiae of your life, if you so wish. The service may offer suggestions or advice in decision-making, and perhaps it may even be relied upon to make certain decisions for you autonomously.

What on Earth could catalyse this transformation?..

Imagine that you’re a mobile telephone network operator. Right now, you own the data describing the customer’s use of your network. What competitive advantage might be had by reversing that situation, by transferring ownership to the customer – on the condition of service of course that you can have access to their data in order to determine billing and associated aspects of your service provision? And what if you gave the customer the tools to learn about her data, to download it and share it with whomever she wished. What might she learn about herself and her family? How might this data be mashed up? How much easier would it be to source the perfect tariff for the next year given the opportunity to share last year’s data? If you think that sounds bad for business you’re effectively saying that opacity is good. History has shown that walled gardens and other protective practices eventually crumble in competitive telephony markets.

An interesting start to the day today... over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

I can't tell you what they are (well, without being retained by you anyway!)

Thanks to Andrew Bruce Smith (@andismit) for being in the chair, and for Andrew Ross (@AJMRoss) for putting the session together.

I've just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today's Social Media Conference. I'm delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here's my presentation.

I know... it's a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.

Always ready with a smart answer, he suggests I have two stacks in future... one for the presentation, one for slideshare.

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

It's ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.

What's it about?

The Business of Influence is a rethink.

It's about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.

The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.

The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It's a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy. Read more

According to BusinessWeek, Groupon could be the fastest growing business of all time – going from zero to rejecting a rumoured six billion dollar offer from Google two years later on the basis it seriously undervalued the company. It's now eyeing up a twenty five billion dollar IPO. Not bad for a discount voucher business.

"Would you go back to the spa?" I ask. "Definitely" she replies. And then came the qualifier, unprompted: "When they run another Groupon deal."

In other words, the spa in question secured a transaction and eliminated themselves from building a mutually-valued relationship. My sister-in-law will now find it impossible to value the service in her mind at £300, or indeed much more than £100. And with Groupon taking 40-50% commission, it will have been a loss-making transaction at that (following standard accounting principles). Read more